Microsoft Azure cloud spent eight hours off-line this week

Users of Microsoft’s Azure cloud service were not happy earlier this week when service was down for roughly 8 hours around the country. Microsoft was working hard to get the Azure cloud service back up and running. Apparently, Microsoft did a decent job of keeping users informed. Apparently, the software giant alerted users via the platforms online service page roughly each hour.

Microsoft warned early during the outage that hit was having issues with Windows Azure service management and customers wouldn’t be able to carry out service management operations. However, storage accounts were unaffected and users were able to access those during the outage. Some hosting services were expected to have capacity issues, but fewer than 3.8% of those services were affected according to Microsoft.

Microsoft determined what was causing the problem by 4 AM GMT and started working on a hot fix. Microsoft said, “We have identified the root cause of this incident. It has been traced back to a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT.” The rollout of the fix started at 9 AM GMT. This outage again proves that moving essential services to cloud-based offerings does not guarantee they will always be available.